Google – What Lies Beneath
August 15, 2006 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
About a month ago BusinessWeek had an article about Google’s ability to launch successful products. I actually missed the article at the time, so I’m just reading it for the first time today.
BusinessWeek’s premise is that Google keeps throwing stuff on the wall and nothing much seems to stick. They’re still relying on search for their mainstay of success and income. Analysts think Google stock is still undervalued at $400 ($380 actually at this moment) and think it should be more in the $500 – $600 range. Yet that speculation is based on some of these other items sticking and beginning to actually expand the Google-sphere outside of search.
Consider just a few examples: Google Talk, an instant-messaging service launched last August, now ranks No. 10, garnering just 2% of the number of users for market leader MSN Messenger, according to comScore Media Metrix. Three-month-old Google Finance, heralded as a competitor to market leader Yahoo! Finance, has settled in as the 40th-most-visited finance site, according to data from Hitwise, a competitive intelligence firm. Gmail, the e-mail service that was lauded at its 2004 launch for offering 500 times as much storage space as some rivals (they quickly closed the gap), today is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail.
I disagree with the comments on Gmail (I guess I can’t really disagree with the actual numbers). I now much more highly prefer my Gmail account over my Yahoo! or Hotmail (which actually now Windows Live Mail). I’m wondering if some of those numbers are just based on the probably 1,000’s of addresses on both MSN, Hotmail and Yahoo, SBC and now ATT that are hardly used or anything anymore, but like mine are merely back-ups so still active.
Regardless, blogger Rian Stockbower has some very interesting thoughts on why it doesn’t really matter to Google how each individual product is doing. A few of his specific comments that I believe really ring true include:
Much ado is made about Google’s 80/20 time. You’ve all heard about it: 20% of a person’s time may be spent on personal projects of their choice. Google News, Gmail, and several other popular Google products came out of this 20%. The 20% keeps engineers happy by allowing them to work outside their primary focus, and it gives Google some new products.
And the obvious impact of allowing your employees to have that type of free development time.
It doesn’t matter what you run on top of the platform once it’s in place. That’s why Google can keep throwing service after service onto the pile and it doesn’t matter if most of them fail because the cost of maintaining them is negligible: the grid is running whether Google Product du Jour running on top of it or not. With plenty of capacity, there’s no compelling reason not to keep adding to the list of prodcuts and services: users will cherry pick their services of choice.
I encourage you read both articles and think about it yourself. Please comment here on your thoughts, I’d love to hear what you have to think.
Source: So Much Fanfare, So Few Hits
Source: Google’s new product “stickiness” doesn’t matter
Rian has some interesting posts on his site. I’ve added him to my Bloglines and am excited to hear what he has to say about our Emerging Earth in the future.
Thanks for the link love and kind words!
Incidentally, it was a bit outside the scope of my own article, but Gmail’s being “smaller” ultimately doesn’t matter very much.
Why?
Because I have a feeling — like you do — that Gmail addresses are more used than their hotmail or Yahoo counterparts. Yahoo and Hotmail have been around longer, and people are loathe to change their email address too often.
Gmail will probably always remain popular because you don’t have to pay to have it forward somewhere else, as I believe you do with Hotmail and Yahoo.
I’ll echo what you’re saying about Yahoo/Hotmail. I’ve got accounts on both that are still active, but I don’t use them for anything.
Maybe this is “Duh!” but I realized what Google is up to with their spreadsheet and calender and everything. The more time you’re looking at a Google powered site, the more ads they can serve. It fits perfectly with their business model. Now, whether or not they can turn these experiments into successes is another question.
Yes. ;)
People were talking about a GoogleOS a year or so ago. But they missed the boat. When and if Google comes out with an operating system, it’s going to be a Webtop, not an installable operating system like Windows or Linux or Mac OS X.